Social Dance for Successful Aging:The Practice of Health, Happiness, and Social Inclusion Amongst Senior Citizens

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of social
dancing for successful aging amongst senior citizens in three locales:
in Blackpool (GB), around Belfast (NI), and in Sacramento (US). Social
dancers are found to navigate an intense space in society, one of
wellbeing accompanied by a beneficial sense of youthfulness. Besides
such renewal and self-actualisation, findings also attest to the perceived
social, psychological and health benefits of social dancing amongst senior
citizens. They also articulate three different social dancing practices:
social dance as tea dance (Sacramento), social dance as practice dance
(Blackpool), social dance as motility (Belfast and environs).

Marie Sallé, Handel, Rameau and the development of narrative dance music:Bericht vom Internationalen Symposium an der Hochschule fur Musik und Theater Leipzig

Paradigmatic analysis reveals that these two composers developed distinct responses to creating narrative in dance music

'Handel's unpublished dance music':A perspective on his approach to composition

Provides incipits of the dances not then in modern editions.

‘A dance for all the outcasts’: Class and Postcolonialism in Brendan Behan’s An Giall and The Hostage

As Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi argue, ‘translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum; it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer’. In understanding Brendan Behan's most celebrated and controversial translation, of his spare Irish language play An Giall (1958) to its riotous English counterpart The Hostage (1958), understanding the problematic ‘intercultural transfer’ between British and Irish life in the 1950s is crucial. Comparisons between both works reveal significant changes that illuminate Behan's relationship with both nations and provide a sometimes oblique metacommentary regarding his most pressing political and personal anxieties. Yet for all their differences, the plays also share a common desire to transcend the divisions forged by the colonial experience through critical understandings of life on either side of the Irish Sea. In this essay, I argue that Behan's act of transculturation reveals a great deal more reflexivity and depth than many of his critics would allow, developing an iconoclastic dialogue between British and Irish mid-century life.

Developing dance music from the song tradition

This paper takes an historical look at the development of now popular Irish dance tunes which originated in or passed through the song tradition. It discusses the role of what I have termed ‘intermediaries’ which bridge the gap between the song and dance music traditions, allowing repertoire to flow between these two tributary streams of the modern tradition. I will discuss the under-investigated practice of lilting, which I will argue has acted as an important intermediary between the dance and song traditions, particularly in the eighteenth century. before going on to discuss some examples of songs and dance tunes which have a more complex relationship.

POINTS OF VIEW: Multi-Roling Performance in Ireland in the 1990s, Part 1 (Layering)

This series of posts will consider the acting techniques required for this style of performance with reference to four productions from the 1990s in which two actors took on multiple roles: Frank Pig Says Hello (1992), Co-Motion’s stage adaptation of Pat McCabe’s novel; The Butcher Boy, Corca Dorca’s production of Disco Pigs (1996) by Enda Walsh; DubbleJoint’s production of Stones in his Pockets by Marie Jones (1996) and its subsequent award-winning revival which I produced at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 1999; and Kabosh’s production of Mojo Mickybo by Owen McCafferty (1998). The discussion will focus primarily on my own empirical exploration of the demands multi-roling places on an actor through the direction of recent revivals of Mojo Mickybo for Belfast’s Chatterbox Theatre Company (2013) and Bedlam Productions (2015).

POINTS OF VIEW: Multi-Roling Performance in Ireland in the 1990s, Part 2 (Characterisation)

The 1990s in Ireland saw a series of highly successful theatre productions in which actors played a multiplicity of roles. This has often been attributed to the economic exigencies of the times, but it also depended on the availability of flexible actors with the physical and psychological capacity to embody a wide range of identifiable characters within the one production.

This second of two posts considers the acting techniques required for this style of performance in relation to the differentiation of one character from another. The discussion will focus primarily on my own empirical exploration of the demands multi-roling places on an actor through the direction of recent revivals of Mojo Mickybo for Belfast’s Chatterbox Theatre Company (2013) and Bedlam Productions (2015).

A Practical Approach to Using Motion Capture in Performance Dance

Markerless systems are becoming more ubiquitous due to their increased use in video games consoles. Cheap cameras and software suites are making motion capture technologies more freely available to the digitally inclined choreographer. In this workshop we will demonstrate the opportunities and limitations provided by easily accessible and relatively inexpensive markerless motion capture systems. In particular we will explore the capacity of these systems to provide useful data in a live performance scenario where the latency, size and format of the captured data is crucial in allowing real-time processing and visualisation of the captured scene